Ask HN: Idea Sunday • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#191

Post by guptaneil » Sun, Apr 06, 2014, 8:33 PM UTC

gfosco wrote: post #162

I want to search for furniture, and other products, based on dimensions. My girlfriend and I furnished a new apartment recently, and had to be space conscious.. This spot next to the couch could fit a 10" wide table. It's not easy to search for that, yet the information is there. My original plan was going to use the Amazon API and take a search term and page through looking for dimensions that fit. I still think it'…

In college, I won a business pitch competition with the idea of using a digital laser measure to measure the dimensions of any space, and then only show you furniture that fits within that space. It had some other aspects, but that was the gist of the idea. It looks like Ikea and others are slowly working their way towards that ease of use, but it's still a ways away.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#192

Post by earless1 » Sun, Apr 06, 2014, 8:34 PM UTC

plaxis wrote: post #86

Search function for browser tabs. So hard to find pandora in the haystack, and I need a short cut to search through all the interesting things.

Firefox already has this built-in to the tab groups view http://imgur.com/1060tx7

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#193

Post by mrfusion » Sun, Apr 06, 2014, 8:37 PM UTC

Put a drain at the top of toilets to prevent overflows (like sinks already have)

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#194

Post by arjie » Sun, Apr 06, 2014, 8:38 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #179

arjie wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an idea: Remove visible karma. Your personal karma is invisible to you and you have no feedback on how a post did. Karma is still used to kill comments, but everything above a certain score (say 5) is ranked arbitrarily (say MD5 of unix timestamp of comment). Alternatively, make it public what everyone voted up on. That way everyone is open to criticism for what they voted on, and like people do on Facebook, t…

[deleted]

Well, that's okay, isn't it? It's the idea that counts, so the discussion will still occur. It doesn't matter that it is centred around your comment that came after mine.

EDIT: Context for those who come after: Some other commenter said he downvoted my comment because he posted something similar. I assumed he said that to illustrate a flaw in my proposal and that he did not _actually_ downvote me. Since I can't find the comment that is similar (he's deleted what he's said), I'm leaving it up.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#195

Post by alex8022 » Sun, Apr 06, 2014, 8:39 PM UTC

Eleutheria wrote: post #105

Open University. A massive repository of all books needed for any career. No teachers, no videos, no homework, nothing, just the books, free, forever.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

I'm not sure what the quality of the books are overall, or the consistency between books, but I've had some luck with introductory level info. It looks like a good start and seems to be the same basic concept as what you describe.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#196

Post by sjclemmy » Sun, Apr 06, 2014, 8:39 PM UTC

cnaut wrote: post #156

raldi wrote: post #44

A way for employees to push back against their coworkers when they email too much crap to too wide an audience. In other words, I wish my Inbox had a little voting widget next to each message: +------------------------------------+ | 4,376 people received this message | | | | [Cool, it was ] [It was a waste] | | [important and] [of my time to ] | | [worthy of our] [ read this ] | | [ time ] [ message ] | | | +-------…

Attent by Seriosity has an interesting solution to this: http://www.seriosity.com/attent.html . They create a scarce currency that companies use internally to send messages.

The broader point this raises is the cost of information exchange, not just corporate email but all valuable content. I can envisage some system attaching cost to information exchange. Kind of like curating through market forces. I suppose it's an extension of what a search engine does. Anyone come across this idea anywhere?

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#197

Post by mrfusion » Sun, Apr 06, 2014, 8:41 PM UTC

Use ultrasound to measure shoe size and also see how we'll shoes fit. Sell to shoe stores.

(I heard they used to do this with X-rays before people knew better. )

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#198

Post by Mz » Sun, Apr 06, 2014, 8:42 PM UTC

quaunaut wrote: post #185

iamwithnail wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue isn't just about the internet echo chamber though, it's a more fundamental thing that people seek out news sources and opinions that reinforce their own biases - totally the right thing to tackle, but it's not just about internet communities.

Totally. But I'm a programmer, so I'd like to solve it on the internet. We can push it out into the real world after that. And I just refuse to believe we've figured out everything there is to know about community engineering.

Be wary of overly technical solutions for what are essentially people problems. Technical solutions can be useful tools for moderators but removing too much human judgment from the process creates more problems than it solves.

This is an interesting space to me. I hope to write more about it in the future. I think I have done one blog post (on my current personal blog) on the topic of moderation but I have been a moderator a few times and have done some A/B testing of different approaches. But I still struggle with how to talk about it to other people, who often think I am just full of hot air.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#199

Post by jedberg » Sun, Apr 06, 2014, 8:42 PM UTC

tcpekin wrote: post #118

jedberg wrote: post #74

I like live shows. I would like a website that lists all the live shows in my area. Like "show me all shows at Shoreline". I haven't found a single site that tells me this.

I spend a significant amount of time looking up live shows, but what about the Ticketmaster website for Shoreline doesn't do this? As far as I know, everything at Shoreline has to go through Ticketmaster/Live Nation. If the venue doesn't have their own calendar, most of the time Ticketmaster/Live Nation does. My personal solution is just to go through all the venues individually that I'm interested in. In the bay are…

Yes, I should have said "Show me all events near San Francisco", because as you aptly point out a single venue is easy to search. The problem is that I have to find all the venues, do all the searches, and then do it again as they add more shows!

So yeah, a single site, maybe one where I can upload my iTunes song list or link to my Pandora or something so it can sort by why I like, would be awesome.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#200

Post by anonymousDan » Sun, Apr 06, 2014, 8:43 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #40

An IaaS provider which meets "paranoid" security requirements -- essentially, being able to remotely provision a box in a trustworthy way, and know you "own" that box at least as much as if you'd carried it to colo yourself. Then, the ability to secure those boxes (and boxes you drop off in colo) against tampering short of powering them off. (tech details: Intel TXT, TCG TPM, cheap HSMs, Intel SGX, etc.)

Hey, interesting, I'm a researcher working in this area as it happens. Have you any particular classes of application you'd want to use this for? What level of performance hit would you be willing to take? Would you be happy to just have a mechanism that enables you to determine after the fact that you've been hacked or data has leaked due to a misconfiguration, or would you mainly be interested in mechanisms for preventing such issues ever happening?